A few important things about marketing coursework

It seems likely that at about this time of year you will have at least one coursework assignment. Here a few points about how good grades can be encouraged to appear

• Have a plan. You'll have other things to be getting on with in your life - inside and outside study. No one is going to plan your time for you, so you'll have to get organised. Make sure you know when your deadline is.
• Get on with it! Don't prevaricate. Good work is easier when you have time to read and research and then put your thoughts together coherently - use all the time you have, don't assume you can throw something together at the last minute and still pass. Standards are likely to be higher than you have encountered before if this is your first university semester. Work that has been rushed is painfully obvious to the experienced eye. You aren't fooling your marker - so who are you fooling?
• One of the points addressed in an earlier post was that marketing covers so many issues and perspectives simultaneously - make sure you have a reasonable strategy. Will you cover all points with equal care, or are there elements of the situation/problem that you think need more time and attention?
• Try to think quality, not quantity. That is a glib phrase - but it has an important meaning for us here. Psychologically, you might find the number of words you're given as a target challenging. At some point - if you've done enough reading and research - it will slip to being a number you'll worry about getting under - not over! If this change doesn't happen, that is a clear sign you haven't done enough preparatory work. The best quality work by students has been edited and re-edited. Submitting your first draft is not something to do if you want a good mark.

Dealing with the problems

In the last post I noted some of the things that can make being a marketing student difficult.

The problems I identified were:

1. Information overload
2. Subject diversity
3. Heirarchy of knowledge

So if these are problems, how to solve them? Alas a real solution isn't possible - rather a marketing student must try to ameliorate them - reduce them to something that is manageable rather than overwhelming.

1. Information overload. In the medium term, you will become used to the volume of information. You can help this process by going to class, reading the materials suggested - as a minimum, doing better will require extra reading and selection of things to read. Try to avoid being left behind by ignoring the reading - it might be impossible to ever catch up.
2. Subject diversity. There will be elements of the subject that you intuitively grasp - either because of the way your brains works or previous experience and/or education. Be glad of these. More importantly, there will be elements that you find difficult or uninteresting. Consumer behaviour might be a good example of the former for many students, market research [maths!] of the latter. Don't ignore these problematic topics - don't label them as boring when what you mean is that you find them difficult. Athletes work hard on their weaknesses - a footballer's weaker foot for example - rather than pretending they don't exist. You should do the same - work out which bits you understand and which bits you don't and manage your study time accordingly.
3. Heirarchy of knowledge. How do you start studying marketing? That is a tough question. From the perspective of those teaching/training rather than learning it isn't obvious either. If you look at a lot of the textbooks, there are groups wrt approach. Some start off with the marketing concept, others with the role of marketing within an organisation. My personal preference though is to begin with looking at consumer behaviour. As someone new to the subject, you might not have much work experience if you are quite young - or have been involved in marketing issues in your previous professional life. What you will have some experience of is of being a customer and consumer [refer to your favourite glossary!]. My experience in that looking at selected elements of consumer behaviour is something that most peope are able to 'get', and from there we can link to segmentation, branding and many other key topics.

If you have a problem - think how to deal with it and put your plan into action. Don't let small problems grow into big ones.

Is marketing hard to study?

Here is a question you might not have asked yourself before you signed up to take a class in marketing:

Is marketing a hard subject to study?

My answer – as you might have already come to expect from an academic - is that it depends.

What can make it hard? Having observed thousands of marketing students over the years I have noted that there are three things that can commonly cause a problem – even for bright students – over and above issues that apply to all new students:

1.       Information overload.  A thing that often surprises new university students is that whilst the general complexity of ideas they must engage with is something that is not beyond them, the sheer quantity of information – pages to read, A/V materials to watch, lecturers to listen to – is an order of magnitude higher than anything they have encountered before.

2.       Subject diversity. One of the descriptions I give of university marketing education [as opposed to professional training] is as a subject that pinches the shiny bits from social sciences and applies them in a commercial context. One day learning about marketing might require you to be a psychologist [consumer behaviour], the next might require you to be a sociologist [cultures of consumption] or an anthropologist [market segmentation]. Alongside these social science hats, marketing students must sometimes be technologists, economists, statisticians and so on. Some people have a genuine and deep talent in a narrow area – the maths wizard who can’t tie his own shoelaces. Marketing students that do well tend to have a wider knowledge and skill set. Jack-of-all-trades. Of course, the second half of that saying is master-of-none, and we’ll talk about that in the next blog post

3.       Hierarchy of knowledge. That is a very posh phrase – what can it mean? Do you remember how you started studying mathematics? 2+2=4. After you mastered simple addition you would have moved onto subtraction, then multiplication and finally division. Years later and you might have been capable of second-order partial differentiation whilst picking your nose – but each and every intervening stage would have been built on the knowledge and skills you gained in the last. Marketing isn’t really like that. The way forward isn’t always clear and even selecting a starting point can be difficult.

Each of those can represent a real problem. Taken together, they can be a real killer. In the next post I’ll talk about you can manage these difficulties and outline the positives of being a marketing student.

Who should read this blog?

Hello and welcome.

This is a new blog in support of the textbook ‘Introduction to Marketing’ – published by FT Prentice Hall and written by Armstrong, Kotler, Harker and Brennan. I’m Michael Harker, the third on that list and I am an academic at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

This book is intended to accompany introductory classes in marketing – and if you are a student of marketing it is likely that you will be using this book [or a similar/competing textbook] to help you with your studies. If so, then keeping up with the contents of this blog might be helpful to you.

Who else might find it worthwhile to read these postings? If you are teaching rather than studying business in general or marketing in particular I hope you will find useful items here. Professional marketers often comment on the value and relevance of the training and education they received – I hope I will be able to encourage them to provide comment and feedback on the knowledge and skills they apply to their jobs everyday.

So, what sort of content will this blog have? It seems to be that the best blogs keep a strong theme but provide a variety of material on or around it, so here are my initial thoughts on what you might expect to see here:

1.       Discussion of basic concepts and processes in marketing

2.       Review and reflection of marketing-related news stories

3.       Examples of marketing practice – good and bad

4.       Considerations of problems and issues that confront students of marketing

Enough for a beginning I think.